If you want an EF Office that is closer melodically to the modern books, I would suggest using the Antiphonale Monasticum of 1934, rather than the Liber (if that is, in fact, what you are using).

If you couldn’t keep up with the LOTH, how are you going to keep up with the 1963 Divine Office? It takes approximately 2.5 hours each day for a priest proficient in reciting it to simply labiate it quickly? When my spiritual director was teaching me how to recite it he specifically said only work at it gradually and not to recite it all at once (Lauds and Vespers to start, Matins last). He warned that ambitious seminarians try to do it all at once (merely reciting it) and end up burning out.

@SponsaChristi

1963 Divine Office?

Well I have a day hours book, Latin / English from 1934, So no Matins, but it does fit in my pocket 2"x3"x5", and has all the English Proper Offices. I can't think how a new Rite book for the whole cycle could be a pocket sized book.

While I take issue with the petitions that are added to every office and which I dislike for many reasons, the biggest thing that has discouraged me from chanting the OF office is that it's too variable. The fact that the psalms are spread across 4 weeks makes it impossible to really keep up with the sequence if you pray the office sporadically, or a ferial office is replaced by a feast. With the EF office things are consistent and lends itself better to memorization than the OF, and it's easier to get back into the swing of things because it doesn't take a month to get back to the same office.

how are you going to keep up with the 1963 Divine Office? It takes approximately 2.5 hours each day for a priest proficient in reciting it to simply labiate it quickly

So long it will take for 1963 Office only if all the hours will be indeed sung. Recited Office should take much less. In order to have a recited office this long you have to go back to pre-1911 version, and even there probably for Sundays or penitential Saturdays only.

The complaint about mode three is an interesting observation. Since I prefer to use alternating fauxbourdones (homophony) with plainsong psalm tones, I do not mind the later medieval mode three structure. However, I have sometimes simply changed, when singing the c notes to b notes and they may in some instances sound better, or closer to what you are preferring. I certainly do not see this as an insurmountable obstacle.

Mode three is also not necessarily an extraordinarily common mode to begin with...

As for the singing of the office of vespers lauds with proper melodies being lengthy, I think this is simply how it is when you are new to the music. Most music for the divine office is quite simple and easy compared to the Holy Mass. Give yourself a few years of time and the singing of the office will become rather more feasable, more familiar, the different melodies will be sung again and again year after year, they become memorized and than very little effort to go through with ease. The burden than dissappears. Be patient! :-) God will lead to peace.

As far as the length of the Office goes, again because I have no canonical obligation, I try to say Lauds and Vespers, and then Compline, if I can. The offices sometimes take me around 45 minutes because I’m shuffling through multiple books to compare chants while I pray, as well as reading the English translations of the proper parts. If I just go through the office on its own, it takes as little as 30 minutes. On days I only manage one office, it’s still the best spent time of my day. The long-term goal is to compile things neatly enough that my wife can pray with me.

Bumping this up by asking: is Dr. Schaefer on this forum and does anyone know the status of his Antiphonale Duplex project? I would find it most helpful!

I've been chanting the Office daily for a good number of years now. When Les Heures Grégoriennes came out at the end of 2008, it was a gift. First of all I have to make a point of ensuring that the Office is prayer, and doesn't instead become a hobby. I've experimented a fair myself bit but keep coming back to LHG. I can do the day hours entirely in Latin chant, the French translation is right beside the Latin, and everything can be done from the same book for any given Office. It makes for a nice fluid liturgy.

As a secular oblate I also have some perspective of the monastic offices. The abbey I belong to uses monastic Schema B which is all 150 psalms in one week, so about the same length as the EF ('11-'63) Office. I've just spent an entire month at the abbey on a working retreat (librarian, porter, translator). I attended all 7 liturgies each day (6 Offices-Sext and None are combined, and Mass, starting with Vigils at 5 am). It's a lot of work! A regular (non-feast or memorial) day is about 3.5 hours of hard pew time! Outside the abbey, I have some semblance of a life, so the Liturgy of the Hours works out very nicely around the generalized chaos that is my life.

I also realized that because the monks sing in alternance, one only chants half as many verses as if one did it solo. Plus the abbot chants the Pater, lead cantors intone each antiphon, a cantor chants the intercessions while the others only chant the refrain, the hebdomadier chants the collect.

So in terms of "work", chanting the 4-week LOTH solo vs a monastic Office in choir is not that much different. Being a Benedictine, balance is also very important to me. The psalms are the same no matter what schema is used. Having the convenience of everything in one book, with appropriate antiphons (LHG pretty much follows the new Ordo Cantus Officii for the ferial Office), makes for a nice liturgy. I use a lot of silence as well, between psalms and readings, which allows me to re-read the psalm in French as my Latin comprehension is far from perfect.

Plus I am joining into the official prayer of the Latin Church. Like many, at first I disliked the LOTH finding it too skimpy. But when done with care in a slow meditative manner, and chanted in Latin, it has really really grown on me.

Ora

Coming back to this:

Most likely this came about as a result of the “breviarification” of the Office, where the office became divorced from the Gregorian corpus, a merely textual tradition, and so was textually revised without reference to the Gregorian tradition and had to be re-set to a Gregorian melody when the “de-breviarification” finally came about.

This is only partially true and ought to be corrected. For some reason, the redactors of the Divino Afflatu office created three new antiphons for Sunday Vespers despite the psalms being the same; in many cases — most, in fact — the psalms were moved or even divided where there was no division before, which required new antiphons. One wonders if it was simply not possible in 1911 to use only authentic antiphons, but in any case, the Tridentine breviary all the way down to the editions published under Pius X included "Nos qui vivimus." So, this is another problem with the Divino Afflatu office: the redactors went beyond their mandate and in a sense explicitly violated it.

I don't want optionitis to occur; this is a problem that plagues the Novus Ordo, as we are all too well aware, and particularly the office, given the paucity of materials for some hours and the differences between Roman and Solesmes books (the same exists for sung Mass, actually). In any case, it would be interesting to get permission for pre-1911 Sunday Lauds, Vespers, and Compline. Yes, you'll be repeating some of the psalms in the week, some of the melodies for Vespers don't exist in the post-1911 books which are commonly sold or are available, and the pre-1911 melodies are decidedly inferior, at least in my opinion. But restoring the Laudate psalms to Sunday as a start, using the traditional Vespers antiphons, and singing all of the psalms at Compline including a psalm that includes one of the Last Words of our Lord seems important if the goal is the restoration of the Roman rite and not a series of stopgap measures.

And Dom Pothier wrote a number of letters in which he complained about the choice of the antiphons. "Antifona male scelta" ("Antiphone badly chosen") was his verdict about many of the antiphons for the ferial office. Sometimes he sounds really angry: "E ancora UNA VOLTA perchè cambiare l'antifona ad Magnificat ???" ("And ONCE AGAIN why change the antiphone for the Magnificat ???")